1897.] 
311 
H. P. Shastri— Notes on Palm-leaf MSS. 
and Buddhist. Five or six men are engaged in copying MSS. borrowed 
from the Badas and Pandits. A Lama is dictating from Tibetan 
which a Pandit is taking down in the Newari character, while an inter¬ 
preter is engaged to see if the transcription is correct. 
I will confine myself to-day to the few palm-leaf MSS. that I 
had the good fortune of examining in that Library. There are altoge¬ 
ther 83 bundles of palm-leaf MSS. There are some bundles which, 
contain more than ten different works. Pandit Visnuprasad Raj- 
bhandari, the officer in charge of the Library, estimated the number of 
Manuscript works on palm-leaf to be 200. All of these MSS. are ancient 
and written in various characters, Newari, Kutila, Nagari and Bengali. 
The first MSS. that I examined was a very remarkable one. It is a 
complete copy of the Yavana-jataka. Portions of the last leaf have 
been worn off. Dr. R. Mitra noticed two mutilated copies of this work, 
one, in Mithila, with 24 leaves ; and the other, in our own collection, 
only 8 leaves. The Benares College copy is only one leaf. 
The Copy in the Maharaja’s Library contains the following entry 
at the end :— 
SPfiT’Bcr: vrreifwt WtsnfT I 
tWcTT 
si V 
ii 
sflr 
ftwraw + + + + i 
N* 
-f 4- 
v > 
TT ^ T 
C\ , 
wtpc 11 
ffT 
I ^vT I 
There are evidently two names and two dates. The first is Yava- 
neqvara, in the year Visnugraha, i.e,> 91 of some era not mentioned 
who translated into Sanskrit a work from his own language. The 
